Quicken Chronic Financial Institution Issues is Quicken a DEAD Product?

Greg6251

Not sure how others feel - but I am nearly at the end of my rope with Quicken Classic's… as it is now called…almost weekly financial institution connection issues. The latest - PayPal, PayPal Credit, PayPal Cashback Mastercard is now in week #2-3 and no solution in sight. Interestingly, it's annual subscription renewal time and I am wondering Quicken is a relic from days gone by - like Polaroid Cameras, VHS and DVD Videos, etc.

Hey Quicken - and especially the President of Quicken who writes to us occasionly telling us how they continually work to make Quicken better - LISTEN UP - Subscribers are quickly getting a belly full of your issues. WHY must we endure weekly or bi weekly failures to communicate with our financial institutions?

WHEN will the PayPal issue be fixed?

WHY did I have to finally disconnect my Wells Fargo Accounts from downloads after enduring endless two-factor authentication?

Is there ever going to be a Dark Mode for Quicken?

How about an interface refresh? I feel like I am in a time machine back to Windows 3.1 every time I open Quicken.

SUGGESTION - get the chronic financial institution issues fixed - give this matter priority over changing the Quicken Logo. We want Quicken to JUST WORK - so make that happen.

NotACPA

And why do you believe that these are Fidelity issues, and not caused by the various parties that you mention?

Quicken can't fix things that other parties broke.

Chris_QPW

I suggest you move on to some other solution that works for you. You are expecting Quicken Inc to solve problems that are completely out their control, and therefore will never happen.

Getting all the financial institution connections to work is literally impossible. In the EU it would probably be close to 100% doable, but not in the US or Canada. In the EU for years, they have required all their financial institutions to support one or both of two standardized protocols to download transactions.

In the US and Canada there is zero requirements to do this. This has resulted that there is no uniform way to fix this problem. The OFX protocol (One of protocols that the EU adopted above) which Quicken calls Direct Connect was an attempt by Intuit, Microsoft, CheckFree, and "the financial institutions" to create a standard for this and have the financial institution support it. At the most only 4,500 financial institutions in the US supported it, and none in Canada. That is out of more than 35,000 financial institutions in the US alone.

What about Express Web Connect? Let's face it, that is a hack done out of desperation to try to provide this service (just like Quicken Bill Manager is for that service). Zero standard, the "concept"? Write "scripts" on a server that will log into financial institutions as the user and download the Web Connect/QFX file (that is the reason for the name Express Web Connect) and import it into Quicken. Nice idea until you take a few things into consideration. You may or may not find a way to download transactions in a format that you can convert. The financial institution's website might be "stable" or change all the time. As a business you have to get the approval of those financial institutions. And since you are accessing the financial institution in the exact same way as the user, or a hacker might do (they can write "scripts too") as the concern over security goes up over the years the financial institution makes the process of logging in as the user harder and harder. Intuit did this all by getting "agreements" with the financial institutions to all this and hopefully agree on how get the transactions. But this is done way in the background sometimes not even known to the financial institution's standard IT support people. And frankly they also worked with third-party services that provide website kind of services to some financial institutions to get the approval/method that way.

That brings use to Express Web Connect +. Again, Intuit, Quicken, and "financial institutions" getting together to create a standardized (modern) protocol that they hope the financial institutions will adopt. Note "standardized", yes, public, no. You have to sign a non-disclosure to look at the standardized protocol with is actually called FDX (In the scheme of Express Web Connect + the only thing that changes from Express Web Connect is how Intuit (Quicken Inc's aggregator) connects to and transmits data from the financial institution. Note that OFX is not only standardized, it is standardized in the public domain and even though the very old versions that the financial institutions and Quicken are using don't have all the security features that FDX has, the newest versions of OFX do, and more. FDX is one way. Note OFX allows for both a one-way connection (no bill payments/transfers) and two way.

So, what do you think of the chances of all the financial institutions in the US adopting this? The Quicken Inc CEO might be optimistic about that a lot of them will, but I'm not. I suspect it will be implemented on less than the original OFX/Direct Connect penetration (before they started dropping it), and that the mix of all of the current ones will continue to limp along giving hope and pain to all.

As for Dark Mode. The advantage of Quicken Windows being such an old product means that it has built up a lot of features over many generations/changes in GUIs and GUI APIs. But that also means that those old interfaces are still in Quicken Windows and they were created long before anyone ever thought of being able to customize things like "Dark Mode". So, applying this to all of Quicken and not making it look like a Frankenstein creation, is next to impossible without totally rewriting it, which in turn throws out the advantage of Quicken Windows because they will have to go back and rewrite all of those features.

Note that Quicken Mac now has Dark Mode, but it is also based on a much newer code base due to the rewrite of it started by Intuit in 2007. Then again, Quicken Mac is still missing features that the original Quicken Mac 2007 had. Maybe someday they will get to parity with Quicken Windows features, but I doubt it.

Greg6251

Sorry - not buying it - Subscription Model now where I PAY year after year for what? When it came time to renew to new versions - Quicken always touted the additional Financial Institution Connections added. ANYTHING can be fixed if you put time and effort and resources into it.

And whats up with this Signature? Signature:
This is my website: http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/

Chris_QPW

ANYTHING can be fixed if you put time and effort and resources into it.

So, are you one of those types that tell their kids they can grow up to be anything they like?

Yes, Johnny if you really want it, you can grow up to be Superman.

What you seem to fail realize is that Quicken Inc doesn't control the financial institutions in this world. If a financial institution refuses to fix something, there isn't going to be any amount of work that Quicken Inc can do that will fix it. And it is worse than that, because Quicken Inc doesn't actually talk to any financial institutions. They pay Intuit for that.